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Just before the third burst of gunfire at the Las Vegas concert, Misha Usunov of Danville hit the record button on his phone’s video camera. If he was hit and killed, which he feared was nearly certain, “I wanted my family to know exactly what happened.”

For the next 2 minutes and 47 seconds, as 33-year-old Usunov crouched with friends and strangers under the edge of a three-foot platform, the jolting camera captures the chaos and carnage, the ricocheting bullets and the guttural profanity of one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history.

“Was she shot?” a young man with a backwards ballcap says as he leans over a woman’s limp body and gently wipes her face.

“I don’t know. I have no idea. Listen to me. I’m a fireman,” said the man in a white shirt. “I want you to grab her arms and bring her up with me. Now! Grab her (expletive) arms. Listen to me. Grab her arms!”

“I’m grabbing. I’m grabbing!”

“Reach underneath and grab her!” the fireman says.

“I’m (expletive) trying,” the young man says. “She’s slippery.”

The camera fixes on empty plastic beer cups and a man walking in a stupor, his cowboy hat held to his chest.

Usunov’s voice comes on next, talking to his friend Stephanie Brooker who was crouching with him.“Someone needs to save her,” he says of the injured woman. “People are dying is what’s going on.”

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Usunov forgot he was recording. He never pointed the camera at anything. He just held it in his hand as the scene unfolded on the black asphalt and littered green field illuminated by the festival lights. He was close to the stage where a country band had been playing and in front of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, where it turned out the shots were coming from. As far as he could tell, he would need to cross the entire field to run away from the gunfire and reach an exit.

“We need to get the (expletive) out of here,” Usunov is heard saying.

But the bursts of gunfire kept coming, louder, closer, bouncing off the pavement, the metal of the bleachers. A woman screams out for a friend. “Oh my God. Oh my God,” another says.

“Go!” Usunov says. “Stephanie come over here.”

Then the camera goes black. He can barely remember it, but he thinks he must have put the phone in his pocket as he grabbed Brooker and fled. With bullets whizzing past, they ran across the field, over bodies. But he had tunnel vision, he said, fixated on getting his friend to safety.

“It felt like any second, I was just waiting for a bullet to hit me. It’s almost like you expect it to happen, especially when people are falling around you,” he said in an interview Wednesday, describing one of the most harrowing videos to emerge from Sunday night’s carnage. “You feel you’re next.”

Misha Usunov, 33, of Danville, left, snapped a selfie Sunday night at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival Sunday night with his friend Stephanie Brooker, 26, who grew up in the Bay Area but lives in Las Vegas. When the shooting began, they hid beneath some bleachers as gunfire and screams filled the night. He turned on his video camera to show his family what he thought might be his final moments. (Courtesy Misha Usunov)

On the video, the gunfire sounds in rapid succession, “but when you’re there you hear every gunshot. It’s like slow motion. Your mind singles out every shot. It felt like a lifetime was going by of just gunfire.”

They made it to the exit and raced to a wall next to a church. He helped Brooker and others lurch over the wall, then followed a man who beckoned the fleeing concertgoers to his apartment a few feet away. It was the last time Usunov heard gunfire, and he would only find out later that it had come from a lone gunman on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay. Usunov and Brooker hid in the apartment with the pack of strangers, lights off, without making a sound.

When the danger had passed, someone eventually offered them a ride to Brooker’s house. They walked by tearful vigils of people kneeling on the pavement, laying their hands on the loved ones dragged from the festival grounds to the street.

When they got home that night, Usunov looked at his phone and remembered the video. He watched it, “trying to learn and see what I went through.”

Back in Danville, he’s been replaying it several times a day ever since, to remind him of what really happened.

“Your imagination, your mind goes crazy. It runs in circles,” Usunov said. “It’s a hard thing to grasp, everything you’ve seen. But the video makes it real. If you can accept the reality, then you can take the next step.”

Julia Prodis Sulek has been a general assignment reporter for the Bay Area News Group, based in San Jose, her hometown, since the late 1990s. She has covered everything from plane crashes to presidential campaigns, murder trials to NBA Finals. In a video that went viral, she captured runners paying tribute to a World War II veteran. Her specialty is narrative storytelling.

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